“He stood at the hall door turning the ring, turning
the heavy signet ring upon his little finger while his
glance travelled coolly, deliberately, over the round
tables and basket-chairs scattered about the glassed-in
verandah. He pursed his lips – he might have been going
to whistle – but he did not whistle – only turned the
ring – turned the ring on his pink, freshly washed
hands.”

The Man Without a Temperament

The editor of Rhythm was
capable of provoking strong reactions. “I would like to
throttle you but you are not worth murdering”,
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska said. Virginia Woolf observed, “there was Murry squirming and
oozing a sort of thick motor oil in the background – dinners
with them were about the most unpleasant exhibitions, humanly
speaking, I’ve ever been to.”

Murry’s flair for critical writing and sensitivity to
literary talent won him brilliant friends such as D. H. Lawrence. He eclipsed
his lower middle class beginnings with audacity, but was self-absorbed, out of his emotional depth.
“O Tig, you were so sweet, and so
like a little child that I feel like crying when I write it. I adore you,
darling…” he wrote to Katherine early in their relationship.
To Lady Ottoline Morrell he confided: “Rarely do I feel towards persons any emotion
more intimate than amusement or blank terror...”

Katherine gave a typically
incisive view: “We are both abnormal. I have too much vitality and you have
not enough.” Near the end of her life, she wrote: “Fear. Fear of what? Doesn’t it
come down to fear of losing J.? I believe it does. But, good Heavens! Face
things. What have you of him now? What is your relationship? He talks to
you-sometimes - and then goes off. He thinks of you tenderly. He dreams of a
life with you some day when the miracle has happened. You are important to him
as a dream. Not as a living reality. For you are not one. What do you share?
Almost nothing. Yet there is a deep, sweet, tender flooding of feeling in my
heart which is love for him and longing for him. But what is the good of it as
things stand? Life together, with me ill, is simply torture with happy moments.”